Month: January 2007

I am feeling seriously uncreative today. Just can’t get motivated to work. Here is Finney, who loves our HDTV as much as me, but only because it makes a nice bed in the sunlight.

So yeah, la-la-la, sitting around, being unproductive … tap, tap, tap … isn’t it great to have American Idol back? Isn’t Finney gorgeous? Don’t you wish you could marry him? Well, you can’t.

Okay, so that took up five minutes. How can I not-work next?

My choir’s next concert is all Ralph Vaughan Williams (Ralph is pronounced Raiphe, our director reminds us). I go hot and cold with Vaughan Williams. Sometimes the music is so beautiful it’s hard to get through it without crying. Sometimes, I don’t get it. When one piece we’re doing didn’t immediately grab me, I got a little worried. Then at rehearsal last week I started warming up to it. Even better, the alto next me to me said one of the pieces we’re doing she can’t sing without crying. YAY. I don’t remember which one she said, but yesterday I started working on “Toward the Unknown Region,” and it made me cry!!!

I was so happy. I have to find the alto and ask her if that was the one she was talking about. I’m begging you, find this song and download it. The lyrics are from a poem by Walt Whitman titled Darest Thou Now O Soul.

I’m one of those people who almost never reads poetry unless I’m depressed, and I know the whole world already knows this and I am the last to find out, but Walt Whitman was one fucking great poet.

The words will destroy you. (A good destroy.) I wish I could look at death like this. (I was just thinking, would I have rather written these words or composed the music, and I think I wish I had the talent to have composed the music.)

Darest Thou Now O Soul

Darest thou now, O Soul,
Walk out with me toward the Unknown Region,
Where neither ground is for the feet, nor any path to follow,

No map, there, nor guide,
Nor voice sounding, nor touch of human hand,
Nor face with blooming flesh, nor lips, nor eyes, are in that land.

I know it not, O Soul;
Nor dost thou all is a blank before us;
All waits, undream’d of, in that region – that inaccessible land.

Till, when the ties loosen,
All but the ties eternal, Time and Space,
Nor darkness, gravitation, sense, nor any bounds, bound us.

Then we burst forth we float,
In Time and Space, O Soul prepared for them;
Equal, equipt at last (O joy! O fruit of all!) them to fulfil, O Soul.

I didn’t leave the house at all yesterday, or do a bit of work. I still feel sick, so I’m going out for supplies, and then I’m coming back and curling up in this. Buddy is already there, warming it up. I’m considering doing work-related reading at least. But I’m also considering reading something escapist and watching TV. I wonder which will win?

The work-related reading is kinda fun. I’m reading about early UFO sightings in the 1940’s, when they still called them flying saucers.

Once again, I really thought this book was going to be a snap compared to my book about unsolved murders. I’m working on a small passage about a letter to the editor of Life Magazine that Rhine wrote in 1957, right after pictures of the Little Rock Nine appeared in the magazine. (The Governor had brought in the National Guard to block de-segregation, and prevent nine black students from entering Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.)

Rhine wrote a moving letter, and most people responded positively, but one person in Georgia wrote to say that the word “nigger” wasn’t so bad, and scoffed at what he called Rhine’s “emotional tizzy,” and said, “… there’s a good chance, actors that children are, they maybe [sic] enjoying their roles … As a psychologist, Dr. Rhine should be interested in the white children, particularly girls, with a deep seated (and justly so as Mississippi and other cases prove) fear of integrated rape, forced a bayonetpoint to closely associate with negro boys. Are not their souls scarred?”

Was he referring to Emmett Till, the 14-year-old who was murdered in 1955 because he whistled at a white woman?

I looked the person up, and sure enough, he’s still living in Georgia. I want to call him, to ask him to comment on this letter. Perhaps he might welcome the chance to take these words back, but I might get an equally ugly response, 49 years later. Ugh, ugh, ugh.

But I should call him, right?

I’ve got my usual awards show dinner lined up: potato chips and onion dip. I’m set. This year I actually know someone who is nominated, and for a big one! We’re not good friends or anything, only acquaintences, and barely acquainted, haven’t seen him in years, but still. It will make it more fun. He was nice and I will have someone to root for.

Okay, back to Bridey Murphy research. Although it’s not as interesting as I originally thought. I think I will only include a couple of paragraphs about it. Does anyone know this story? A woman in Colorado was hypnotized in 1952 and a past life came forth, a woman named Bridey Murphy who had lived died in Ireland.